• Murder by Numbers
  

  34 hours playtime

  4 of 4 achievements

i got into this one because i like picross / nonogram puzzles and someone said it had an interesting story too. the mouse controls for doing the puzzles felt great, but the puzzles themselves don’t really look like anything to the extent that you finish a puzzle and wonder how it’s going to color it and what it’s going to call it. the free crossme app on my phone has puzzles that i can recognize as i finish them, though sometimes that means i can cheat a little and fill in squares based on what makes sense. each puzzle is on a grid with rows and columns in multiples of 5, and they get larger as you progress through the game.

the puzzles are the part that take the most time (especially toward the end), and there’s no way to save a partial puzzle if you run out of gaming time. there’s a design flaw in one of the four cases where you can miss one of the puzzles in the story meaning you can’t get S-rank without doing the entire case again and you also miss out on some of the scout’s memories puzzles. other minor annoyances were scanning rooms for puzzles being basically a pixel hunt and the character reaction sound effects.

still, solid puzzles even if the pictures you’re filling in don’t look like anything plus a story that kept my interest make me recommend this game.

• Stick It To The Man!
  

  5 hours playtime

  10 of 16 achievements

what a delightfully silly game! i don’t remember where i first heard of this one, but using a weird stretchy pink hand coming out of your head to grab stickers and put them on other characters looked like fun, and then i won a copy on steamgifts!

the story, as i said, is silly in a way that really worked for me. it’s not entirely complicated and all centers around getting the pink hand and then having people after you trying to get it away from you. in addition to grabbing things with the hand, you can also use it to read minds. that adds to both the silliness and the gameplay, as many puzzles involve manipulating thoughts or moving stickers between thoughts and the real world.

the art style is that everything is made from paper and cardboard, which makes sense with the stickers and is embraced through save points being printers which spit you out on a piece of paper you’re already cut out from. it’s satisfying enough watching the rest of the page fall away that i didn’t even mind that i accidentally put a sticker on a guard when i was attempting to grab a pushpin to jump to . . . or at least i minded less.

i played with my controller and the controls weren’t entirely precise. i’m not terrible at platformers, but i certainly failed to land on a platform that wasn’t all that narrow a couple times. usually that wasn’t an issue because i didn’t need to be all that precise. what frustrated me the most was that it’s difficult to tell which target the hand is going for, and sometimes not easy to get to the one i want, even if there are no enemies and i’m just trying to read the minds of each person in a small group standing together. maybe if you play with mouse and keyboard you’d have a cursor and actually click on the one you want, though with guards chasing you they could still run in front of a pushpin and have you pick the wrong one.

it’s a little short: i finished in about 5 hours and wasn’t at all tired of it. it’s also less than $10 and a lot of fun, so worth adding to your backlog.

• Wasteland Angel
  

  33 minutes playtime

  11 of 40 achievements

this game feels incredibly buggy. started off with a strange resolution, which i didn’t find all that concerning and was able to manually set to my native resolution. then in the tutorial i noticed i could drive slightly beyond the edge of the screen, and even worse enemies will hang out in that space . . . or maybe they aren’t actually there but the game shows that there’s an enemy in that direction. the controls didn’t feel quite right playing with a controller, and the tutorial kept showing the same instructions twice: once for keyboard and once for controller.

the story / setting reminded me a little of mad max (though i’m not particularly familiar with mad max) and it had nice art and voice acting introducing it. the writing is pretty basic though. i also got 11 of the 40 achievements by just playing just past defeating the first boss. as far as i could tell, my normal weapons didn’t do anything to the boss and instead had to lure it over my “super weapons” but also the mines didn’t even seem to explode. doesn’t seem like there’s anything here worth my time here.

• Deiland
  

  24 hours playtime

  24 of 24 achievements

there’s some really great art here, and a light story that was able to keep my interest through to the ending. after that it didn’t take a whole lot to 100% all the tasks and collect all the achievements.

the biggest problem i had was a bug where going into the mine would nearly half the time put me outside the map instead of in the small mine area — sometimes far enough away that i couldn’t even see the mine! if i could see it then i could walk to the outside of the entrance and go back to the surface to try again, but if i couldn’t see it i had to quit back to the menu. i also noticed bugs that the flower seeds had the wrong names when planting them and sometimes bushes grew as small versions of trees.

multiple times the item i needed for a quest wasn’t actually available to me yet and even more often it was but i didn’t know how to get it. there’s a lot of waiting in this game, which sometimes got boring or even frustrating.

• Hard Reset
  

  8 hours playtime

  31 of 115 achievements

i really liked the graphics along with the partially destructible environment and plenty of explosions. nice for when i wanted to not think much but shoot a lot.

the story comes between the bits where you’re actually playing the game, and isn’t tied into the gameplay in any meaningful way. someone came up with an interesting complex world to set this game in, but you only get a hint of the edge of it.

the interface for the upgrade system looked cool but didn’t do a good job of relaying the information i wanted. i’m not sure if some upgrades require that i get earlier upgrades first or how many upgrade points any upgrade would need, or even how many upgrade points i currently have. i did like the element of choice in it though.

i played through on easy and died a few times, not always when fighting a boss. usually the restore point was pretty reasonable, though there was one point i needed to hit a bunch of switches and i may have restored to before i hit one of them because i had to do it again. overall a pretty okay game — likely worth checking out if you already have it, but if you’re looking for something like this there are probably better options out there.

• 7 Billion Humans
  

  13 hours playtime

  19 of 19 achievements

maybe these drag-and-drop programming games shouldn’t be fun for me since usually i’m paid to do development, but i guess it’s different enough i still find it fun. maybe it’s being rewarded for writing non-reusable code that happens to be the fastest solution, or a really slow solution that uses only a few lines. the fun art style and story probably help too.

i had no problem coming up with solutions for each problem, even if some of them were terrible (more than once i ignored all but one worker to get it done in a way that was easier to write but didn’t hit either of the ocd targets). most i was able to tune well enough to get enough speed or few enough lines but to get all the achievements i looked up a few solutions to paste in.

if you’re interested in programming games this is a good one to have fun with!

• Kathy Rain
  

  7 hours playtime

  20 of 20 achievements

look at me playing two point & click games in a row! (then don’t look at me as i don’t actually post an update for like a month afterward.) this one felt a lot like a wadjet eye game, even including familiar voice actors! i think i read dave gilbert was involved with the voice casting / recording so that makes sense. i also had this game flagged as recommended (maybe by someone here) which is why i played it now even though i got it in humble monthly november 2016 and i usually play games in the order i got them.

it had great-looking low-res art, great voice acting, and a compelling story. the usual puzzle or two i didn’t get with the rest satisfying. sometimes the story has you being mean to the people around you which fit the character but doesn’t fit my personality (if you give me a choice to be nice to other characters i’ll take it).

i recommend this one for anyone else into point & click and / or getting drawn into a good story!

• Broken Sword 1 - Shadow of the Templars: Director's Cut
  

  10 hours playtime

  no achievements

it’s been bothering me for a while that i have broken sword 1-3 and broken sword 5, but not 4. didn’t want to buy 4 (even on sale) until i tried out some of the series though, and if they’re all as good as #1 i’ll probably end up doing it.

the story kept my interest well — i’m into illuminati- / templar- style conspiracy stories so that was pretty easy. for the most part i enjoyed the puzzles too, with numerous satisfying to solve. as usual there were one or two that were a type of puzzle i don’t enjoy and i just looked up the solution, and at least one that i simply didn’t understand.

i felt like the beginning was a bit of a bait and switch since you start playing as one character, but then they introduce another less interesting character and play most of the rest of the game as that character. there’s also a completely unnecessary scene i think was intended to be romantic but these days is recognized as assault. those were the only two things i really didn’t like though, and i’m looking forward to the rest of the series!

• DLC Quest
  

  2 hours playtime

  16 of 22 achievements

a quick little game making fun of already-ridiculous dlc practices, but actually presented as a reasonably fun game! you probably have a better chance of appreciating the jokes if you’re into gamer culture, which probably most of us here are. it only took me 2 hours to beat it, and if it was much longer it probably would have overstayed its welcome.

• Zeno Clash
  

  4 hours playtime

  4 of 22 achievements

what a weird game. there’s this whole crazy world where a fairly simple story is set. i’d like to see more of that world, which is why i played all the way through. it doesn’t actually make use of much of it though — i still have so many questions. that kept me going for the 4 hours it took me to play through it, even though the ending didn’t really provide much like where the the human torso but inky dark blue head and limbs came from.

the fighting was sometimes frustrating. i never really managed to get block counter to work, and often what was happening in the combat wasn’t making sense to me. for example i could totally lose a fight barely able to land a punch, then load the latest autosave and run the same strategy and get through with barely a scratch. maybe that was just me never making sense of it — i don’t particularly enjoy fighting games, especially first-person. i guess if you have this in your backlog it’s quite a different sort of story experience so maybe give it a shot!